Drupal

Packt Publishing announced today the release of my second title for them -- Drupal 6 Themes. The title will be published in early Q4 of this year.

Drupal 6 Themes takes what I learned during the writing of the Drupal 5 title and improves on the previous book with more resources, more information and more practical knowledge.

Another factor that shows in this book is that Drupal 6 is a joy to work with. Enormous strides were made with innovations that make theming much more accessible -- without compromising the power and flexibility of the system.

(This book also provides another cheap thrill for me -- the cover photo was taken in my garden in Bali!)

The title is available for pre-order now from the Packt Publishing website. Buy early, buy often!

~ A new version of the Drupal open source CMS is released ~

The Drupal Association today announced the release of version 6.2 of the popular open source content management system. As explained on the Drupal site:

"Drupal 6.2, a maintenance release that fixes problems reported using the bug tracking system, as well as security vulnerabilities is now available for download. The security issues identified were in code new to Drupal 6, and are therefore not applicable to sites running on Drupal 5.

Upgrading your existing Drupal 6 sites is strongly recommended. There are no new features in this release, but we fixed some notable performance issues too. For more information about the Drupal 6.x release series, consult the Drupal 6.0 release announcement."

Learn more here: http://drupal.org/drupal-6.2

Packt Publishing today announced the release of my newest title - Drupal 5 Themes.

As the Packt site explains:

Create a new theme for your Drupal website with a clean layout and powerful CSS styling.

• Learn to create new Drupal 5 Themes
• No experience of Drupal 5 theming required
• Set up and configure themes
• Understand Drupal 5's themeable functions
• Finding your way around Drupal 5's theming architecture
• Locating and identifying the various elements, functions, and styles
• Working with the PHPTemplate templating engine
• Intercepting and overriding default templates and styles

Expected December 2007. Pre-order now!

I think most Drupal fans will find the book of interest. Not only did we explain step-by-step the key functions, but we also documented all the (20+) style sheets and all the themeable functions. It's our hope that even more experienced Drupal developers will find the resources contained in the book to be useful.

In typical Packt style -- 5% of all profits goes back to the Drupal Foundation.

p.s.
In case you had been wondering where I had disappeared to these last few weeks/months -- now you know!